FORGOTTEN BOOK: FRONTIER LAWYER

 Frontier Lawyer by "Lawrence L. Blaine"  (Robert Silverberg & Eleazar Lipsky)  (1961)

New Mexico Territory.  Late 1890s  Jake Kilgore is one of the sharpest lawyers in the territory.  Over the past to decades he has defended over 200 persons for murder and has won all but 20 of his cases, and even them he has never had a client hang.  Jake is smart, crafty, almost scrupulous, self-aggrandizing, and cocky in his ability to read a jury.  Because of his success, he is also one of the most hated men in the territory.  Probably the only person more hated is Dan McCandless, a self-made millionaire who rough-shod his way to wealth and power.

McCandless has a wife who hats him, a daughter who loves him despite his grasping ways, and a wastrel son who despises him.  And now his son, Harry McCandless, is being charged with murder.

Honey Morgan was eighteen, the beautiful daughter of a Santa Fe madam and a girl whose lack of morals was never in question.  She had argued with her mother several months before and moved out, going to San Carlos, and living (platonically) with grizzled Dade Rawlins in his cabin.  Rawlins knew that Honey would go out and meet men, sometimes spending the night, but never more than one night.  When Honey didn't return after two nights, he got suspicious. 

In a fairly isolated part of the country, a wagon bearing the crest of McCandless's ranch pulled over at night and a hooded figure unloaded something large and dropped it there.  The only witnesses were a Mexican husband and wife, both very afraid of authorities.  They investigate and saw the body of a young girl, wrapped in a bloody blanked, and wearing only a flimsy dress and no underwear,  They left the body where it was, telling no one  It was winter and the high mountain cold weather preserved the body until it was discovered by a young priest three days after it was dumped.  The girl's mouth had been stuffed with building plaster and a college fraternity pin was found next to the body. 

Honey Morgan was known to have been seeing Harry McCandless, and it was common knowledge that Harry, who had been kicked out of school, had given the pin to Honey weeks earlier.  Harry and his friend, fellow wastrel Eli Weingarten, had spent the night with Honey, both of them having sex with her.  eli passed out, and -- according to Harry -- Honey became abusive.  He put a dress on her and place her in his carriage to take her home.  On the way (again, according to Harry), she began to whip the horde.  Fearing a runaway or a wreck Harry stopped the carriage and put honey by the side of the road a bit from Dade Rawlin's cabin.  The Harry turned around and went home.

Mike Duer, the sheriff of San Carlos County, was no fan of Dan McCandless or of his son Harry.  Durer was also politically ambitious and had ties to Dan McCandless's bitter rival, the powerful Joel Tilley.  Tilley would like nothing better than to ruin Dan McCandless, and if that meant sacrificing Dan's son to the hangman, so be it.  Also in Tilley's pocket was the territory's attorney general Pete Beaudoin, who decided to prosecute the case himself.

Kilgore had two challenges.  First the evidence:  it was not enough to convict Harry under normal circumstances,  but given the animosity against the McCandless family, it was damning.  Second, Harry himself, who at times seemed stunned and uncaring about what happened to him, and at other times, he would lie and deny obvious facts.  Harry McCandless was the defense's worst enemy.  As evidence piles up and as legal maneuvers fail, it appeared that, for the first time in his career, Jake Kilgore's client would hang.

A tricky, well-written murder mystery with a western flavor and some interesting courtroom scenes.

Frontier Lawyer was published as a paperback original from Permabooks in 1961.  As far as I can tell, it has never been reprinted over the last 64 years.  A shame.  It would make a good addition to, say, the Hard Case Crime of the Stark House Press lines.